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Welcome to the Composition:Today New Music Concert Listings.
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Richard Baker is one of the foremost composer-conductors of his generation. Commissioned through BCMG’s Sound Investment scheme, Baker’s new work for ensemble and electronics addresses the theme of ‘irrational exuberance’; taking in Ravel’s death-driven waltzes, and the sounds of 80s New York disco; with live electronics that Baker has developed together with his colleague, composer/sound artist Nye Parry.

BCMG premiered Causton’s Chamber Symphony in 2009 and this performance will be the Group’s first since Causton revised the piece following its premiere.

Giving context to these works are three pieces from the 1940s and 50s. Scored for unorthodox percussion instruments, John Cage’s Second Construction is one of a series of three works composed between 1939-42, while Cage was touring the west coast of America with a percussion ensemble.

Oiseaux exotiques (Exotic Birds), for piano and an orchestra of winds and percussion, is an enchanting sound fantasy containing imitations of no fewer than 40 different birdsongs or calls. Pianist Nicolas Hodges, the soloist for the Messiaen, is joined by Ryan Wigglesworth to open the concert with Igor Stravinsky’s Sonata for Two Pianos.

There will be a free pre-concert talk from 6-6.30pm with Richard Baker, open to all ticket holders.

London-based composer, producer, and founder of the NONCLASSICAL record label and club night, Gabriel Prokofiev, returns to Milwaukee for a special NONCLASSICAL Milwaukee performance featuring fellow British musicians Joby Burgess, percussion, and Peter Gregson, cello. They will be joined locally by DJ Madhatter and the artist collective/string quartet, Unlooped Versus Dilla, lead by DJ Tarik AKA The Architect at The MOCT on Wednesday, February 15 in Milwaukee. More info at: http://www.presentmusic.org/concerts/nonclassical.aspx.

Pitchers and catchers report. These words inspire excitement; for millions, the beginnings of baseball spring training are the first sign of the waning of winter, the beginnings of spring. Artists are no different. Sports fascinate musicians and composers just as everybody else, and offer a wealth of intriguing compositional opportunities. AME gathers some of the best sports-inspired new music by some of America’s best composers. Concert includes work for piano and baseball mitt, one hundred ping-pong balls and a song cycle about Mike Piazza. Channel your inner sports fan and root for your favorite composers!

Following highly successful productions of John Adams’s Nixon in China and Doctor Atomic, ENO presents the London stage premiere of the American composer’s controversial ‘docu-opera’ about the killing of a Jewish-American tourist during the hijacking of a Mediterranean cruise liner by Palestinian militants.

Alice Goodman’s eloquently poetic and dispassionately even-handed libretto mixes Biblical and Koranic references with real and imagined accounts of what happened on board. Adams’s intensely expressive score captures the private thoughts and emotions of individuals caught up in the complexities of a political and religious conflict that still defies solution. More of a meditation in the style of a Bach Passion than a conventional operatic drama, the result is an utterly compelling and unique piece of theatre.

Tom Morris, co-director of the National Theatre’s War Horse, makes his opera directing debut, while Baldur Brönnimann, who conducted ENO’s Lost Highway and Le Grand Macabre, applies his contemporary expertise to what many regard as Adams’s finest opera.

Despite its chamber scale – this programme contains an embarrassment of riches, a lucky dip of superbly crafted chamber pieces from the last 30 years, full of contrast, some tiny, some substantial, performed by a crack quintet of BCMG soloists.

Some of these works are memorials or tributes; many of them use forms or techniques from music of the past – fugues, chaconnes, canons, inventions; some come from a fascination with past composers. Knussen’s Upon One Note distorts the rhythms and pitches of Purcell’s five part fantasia; Barry’s two minute Aeneas and Dido revisits Purcell’s opera as the composer “felt that Aeneas needed to be given his due”; Machaut can be found lurking behind Birtwistle’s Double Hocket; whilst Philip Cashian’s blistering Caprichos explores the dark, nightmarish world depicted in Francisco Goya’s Los Caprichos etchings.

The performance of Aldo Clementi’s Berceuse is a tribute in itself – to the last of the great Italian 20th century modernists, who died almost a year ago to the day – 3 March 2011.

The Adès studies condense and refashion music from his acclaimed opera The Tempest into a single movement for four instruments. The result is a kaleidoscopic succession of musical portraits –each depicting a shipwrecked character on Prospero’s island – Antonio, Ferdinand, Alonso and Gonzalo.

Warwick Arts Centre and the Coull Quartet present Ping! Music vs Table Tennis, part of PRS for Music Foundation’s New Music 20×12 programme, celebrating the 2012 Cultural Olympiad and the Music Nation weekend.

Life, liberty and big, big tunes! Maybe it’s the raw energy, maybe it’s those swinging rhythms, maybe it’s the sense of ordinary folk doing extraordinary things, but there’s just something about American music and whether we’re hearing the plain-speaking pioneers of Aaron Copland’s Appalachia, or the high-kicking hustlers of Leonard Bernstein’s New York, it’s unmistakable.

Tis The Gift To Be Simple, Somewhere, Mambo!…you already know how they go. So join the BBC Philharmonic and conductor Yutaka Sado, and come share the American dream. As for Chopin’s dreamy First Piano Concerto, if you heard Nobuyuki Tsujii’s remarkable performances with us last season, you’ll already have experienced the almost magical way he communicates with an audience. Expect eloquence, expect fireworks, and expect some truly extraordinary chemistry as he tackles the most romantic concerto by the supreme keyboard poet.

Celebrating John Cage’s centennial year, and his innovation and philosophy, ENO is the first opera company to create, produce and present the composer’s ‘omnium gatherum’ piece. This exciting free event will take place as part of Music Nation, an official countdown event to the London Festival 2012.

In a promenade experience of spectacular and extraordinary performances throughout the London Coliseum, ENO's Musicircus will feature artists including Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and composer Michael Finnissy alongside ENO Music Director Edward Gardner, the ENO Community Choir, ENO Opera Works singers, and an intriguing collective of professional and amateur talents.

ENO's Musicircus is curated by award winning Proms-commissioned composer Stephen Montague. Montague worked with Cage in Europe for fifteen years, touring with him and premiering several of Cage's works. Visual artist Alex Julyan is Montague's long-term collaborator whose prior projects have included work with Punchdrunk and The Wellcome Trust.

Present Music, Milwaukee’s new music ensemble, will provide the stage for 30 of the brightest, most inventive young composers, musicians, dancers, designers, videographers, and visual artists from Milwaukee and around the country.

Pianists Natalie Tsaldarakis and Panayotis Archontides, who form the husband-and-wife piano team Ivory Duo Piano Ensemble, will present a recital for piano four-hands at Blackheath Halls, London on Sunday 4 March, 2012.

The pianists boast many distinctions, including Panayotis’ Silver Medal of the Worshipful Company of Musicians 2007, and Natalie’s election to membership of the American National Music Honour Society in 1994. The ensemble has performed hundreds of acclaimed concerts in the UK and abroad in such venues as Sibelius Academy, Athenaeum Concert Hall, St-Martin-in-the-Fields, St James Piccadilly, St John’s Smith Square, Reform Club, Jacqueline du Pre Music Building (Oxford) etc. The duo has also been featured on Greek radio and TV, as well as on London’s Resonance FM (Sound Out with Carole Finer).

The Villa-Lobos Music Society, in cooperation with The Brazilian Endowment for the Arts, presents The Heitor Villa-Lobos 125th Birthday Anniversary Concer. The Concert features a program of music from a cross-section of the composer’s works for piano, guitar, cello, solo voice and chorus, selected by Dr. Alfred Heller, a friend and protégé of Villa-Lobos.

The Nash Ensemble, amongst our most frequent and welcome visitors over the years, return with a varied programme that highlights the versatility and range of this extraordinary ensemble’s repertoire – from the Horn Quintet, written for the Ensemble by our foremost composer James MacMillan, by way of Brahms at his most romantic to a pinnacle of Dvoøák’s chamber music, his glorious Piano Quintet.

Music evoking the Eastern European plains and vibrancy of its folk culture from two Hungarians, in exile in America: the fresh lyricism of Bartók's Third Piano Concerto (his last complete work) and colourful evocation of Magyar life from one of the last century's great film composers, Miklós Rózsa. And there's music by Arriaga, the "Spanish Mozart" alongside the real thing: Mozart's majestic, final symphony, Jupiter.

The Ivernia Orchestra is an electrifying group of young Irish and UK musicians based in Manchester and from further afield, who have come together to perform works by Irish composers as part of Manchester’s Irish Festival 2012. All works have been composed within the past 30 years.

The mythical figure of Iris, goddess of the rainbow and messenger of the Olympian gods, provides inspiration to both Per N ø g å rd and Qigang Chen. For N ø g å rd it is her personification in nature that inspired his stunning orchestral work, rich in sounds that represent a spectrum of glittering colour; for Chen it is Iris, the woman who grabs his imagination as he portrays "the eternal feminine and its multiple facets" through nine movements that subtly integrate traditional Chinese instruments and a Beijing operatic soprano with a large classical orchestra and two Western sopranos.

Presenting “Post Scriptum” Monday, March 12th 2012 in the Chamber Hall of the Saint-Petersburg Conservatory. Iranian composer Mehdi Hosseini’s “Monodies” will be performed by the New music ensemble Sound Ways under the direction of American conductor Brad Everett Cawyer. Mr. Hosseini has dedicated this work to 20th century Italian composer Luciano Berio. Its world premier was in the Glinka Hall of the Saint-Petersburg State Philharmonic on the opening day of the 23rd International New Music Festival “Sound Ways.”

Hosseini often uses the word monodies not only as the title of his composition, but also as a musical term; by which he means the characteristics of single voice structures, adapting themselves to any musical texture. The composer recently had a new recording published in Tehran, which also takes on the title Monodis. For this album he collected compositions which were written based on regional folk tunes from different parts of Iran. The album was recorded in Russia by well-known local soloists, ensembles, and the Saint-Petersburg State Philharmonic Orchestra and State Academic Orchestra. All of the compositions were written between 2003 and 2009.

In the last few years, Mehdi Hosseini has been actively participating in contemporary music projects local to St. Petersburg, the “Cultural Capital of Russia.” His music is regularly performed in such festivals as St. Petersburg Musical Spring, Contemporary East and West, Contemporary Past, Sound Ways and others. His music has been performed in concert by orchestras such as The St. Petersburg State Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, the St. Petersburg State Academic Symphony Orchestra and more. Works of Hosseini have been published by theCompozitor Publishing House Saint-Petersburg.

Hosseini made an invaluable contribution to the development of the St. Petersburg cultural scene in 2010 when he opened the St. Petersburg Contemporary Music Center “reMusik.org”

Iranian composer Mehdi Hosseini was born in 1979 in Tehran. Hosseini began his musical training in Iran, studying Persian music and the fundaments of composition under the guidance of Farhad Fakhreddini.

Following his studies in Iran, Hosseini finished his Master’s degree at the St. Petersburg State Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory with Professor Alexander Minatsakanian and his Doctor of Music degree (DMA) in Composition with Sergei Slonimsky. Hosseini also studied composition with composer Nigel Osborn, worked on problems of music theory under the direction of professor T. Bershadskaya, and is presently a Doctoral Candidate of Musicology at the St. Petersburg State Conservatory.

The UK premiere of a new opera takes a roller-coaster ride through life in the company of fate. Leading British opera composer Judith Weir transposes the Sicilian folktale Misfortune to today as the daughter of a rich family turns her back on wealth to make her own way in the world – too often with unfortunate results. Not many operas combine great music with breakdancing and a burning kebab van, but Miss Fortune does all this and more under the direction of Chen Shi-Zheng (his spectacular staging of Monkey: Journey to the West was presented at the Royal Opera House in 2008). This new, approachable and engaging opera had its premiere at the Bregenz Festival in summer 2011 and now comes to the Royal Opera stage with the same acclaimed cast – Emma Bell sings the title role and former Jette Parker Young Artist singer Jacques Imbrailo plays her eventual love Simon. Paul Daniel conducts this effective and atmospheric score in a visually beautiful and inventive production whose story is funny, touching, moral and contemporary. Miss Fortune continues the series of high-profile new works of recent years that have included Anna Nicole, The Tempest and The Minotaur. With the added impact of the world-class Royal Opera Chorus Judith Weir’s Miss Fortune is a highlight of this Royal Opera Season.

Richard Uttley began piano lessons at the age of nine. He studied with Ian Buckle at the Junior School of the Royal Northern College of Music before reading music at Clare College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a double first in Music in 2008. His dance-inspired programme contrasts the precision of Bach with the clarity and the deft colours of Debussy. Richard completed his Master’s of Performance (with Distinction) in September 2010 at the Guildhall School of Music in Drama in London, where he studied with Martin Roscoe.

Two world premieres by Bay Area residents round out the American Mavericks concerts. Mason Bates, who is also the Project San Francisco composer, brings his individual style of electronica and choral writing to Mass Transmission. And John Adams introduces Absolute Jest, featuring the St. Lawrence String Quartet and based on fragments of Beethoven scherzos. Rounding out the evening is pianist Emanuel Ax with the SFS in Feldman’s work of free-floating rhythms and slowly evolving sounds, Piano and Orchestra. The Orchestra reprises its highly praised performance of Varèse’s Amériques.